Breaking Boundaries Through Film

Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, an award-winning independent filmmaker, pushes the art of filmmaking forward while portraying the struggles of women in diverse cultures.

Vietnamese women recount their haunting memories; Chinese women converse about Mao and Confucius; Senegalese women work in the shadows of their villages -- these are some of the scenes that Trinh records and interlaces with poetry, popular songs, and archival images to produce memorable films that cannot be classified as experimental, documentary, or narrative, but constitute a new genre of their own.

She says her films can be viewed, in general, as "different attempts to deal creatively with cultural difference, to enhance our understanding of the heterogeneous societies in which we live, and to invite viewers to engage with films and the arts in diverging and enriching ways."

Trinh is a professor of film, women's studies, and rhetoric who joined the Berkeley faculty in 1992. Her five films have been shown internationally and have received many honors, including the jury's Best Cinematography Award at the 1992 Sundance Festival for Shoot for the Contents and the Best Film-As-Art Feature from the 1990 American International Film Festival for Surname Viet Given Name Nam. She also is the author of eight books that range from a collection of poetry to essays on feminism, architecture, and cultural politics.

She is writing a script for a forthcoming fiction film that tells the story of a young woman's spiritual quest and touches on issues of friendship and death; and she observed Japanese art and daily rituals as part of a soon-to-be-released video project that considers how technology is affecting our reality and knowledge.

Trinh's filmmaking and writing are by design difficult to categorize, because "the work I like most is not clearly recognizable as theory, fiction, or poetry, but rather, work that once you enter you don't know what territory you're in." This blend of art and theory aims to translate the cultural dynamics and power relations in societies that have been dominated by European powers, an area of scholarly interest generally referred to as postcolonial studies.

By creatively
working in the intervals between politics and poetry, theory and art, Trinh deftly links the arts with other studies in the humanities and social sciences.

Trinh has a uniquely personal connection to her studies because of her years spent living and working in Vietnam and Africa. Born in Hanoi and raised in South Vietnam, she managed in spite of the ongoing war to distinguish herself as a young musician while studying piano and composition at the National Conservatory of Music and Theater in Saigon. Her French style of education gave her a lasting interest in French theory, and she studied literature and music in France before moving to the United States in the early 1970s. She earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. in French literature and a master of music in composition from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

She then taught for three years at the National Conservatory of Music and Drama in Dakar, Senegal -- a pivotal period that spurred her filmmaking and writing. Her first two films, Reassemblage and the lengthier Naked Spaces -- Living Is Round, were inspired by that experience. Both films explore the rhythms, rituals, and physical space that define women's lives in West Africa, and they do so in a poetic style that explicitly questions the way ethnographic documentaries typically are produced. Naked Spaces won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Experimental Feature at the 1987 American Film Festival.

While the subject matter of Trinh's films enhances the viewer's awareness of other cultures and marginalized people, her filmmaking techniques are as significant as the subjects themselves. She structures her scripts and frames her shots in ways that prompt the viewers to question their own role -- and the behind-the-scenes roles of the director and interviewer -- in shaping the response to a film.

Image from
Trinh's
Surname
Viet Given
Name Nam.
See reference page

In Surname Viet Given Name Nam, for example, she intentionally leads the viewer to think that the Vietnamese women being interviewed are really the people they portray; then, when it becomes clear that the interviews are re-enactments by immigrant-actors who live in the United States, the viewer is led to consider issues such as plural identity and the fictions inherent in documentary techniques. And in A Tale of Love, her 1995 narrative film about a Vietnamese immigrant in San Francisco, she deliberately makes viewers feel a bit uncomfortable during some intimate scenes, as though they are spying on the characters. As Trinh explained in an interview for a film-theory magazine, "Unlike in other films where you can safely indulge in voyeurism, being a voyeur here is acknowledged and even given a prominent part in the film. . . . By making you aware of your being a voyeur, the film induces reflections on the makers' and viewers' consumption of love stories."

By creatively working in the intervals between politics and poetry, theory and art, Trinh deftly links the arts with other studies in the humanities and social sciences. She shares her methods in the classroom and says she tries to inspire students to explore new avenues by combining their specialized academic studies with their creative impulses.

This practice of the arts produces knowledge, as Professor Trinh and the other faculty featured here so clearly demonstrate. While language and text, the vehicles of the humanities, carry scholarship forward, the instruments and media of the arts provide scholars with infinite opportunities for expression and exploration. Not confined to galleries or performance halls, the arts at UC Berkeley are thriving through a symbiotic relationship with the campus as a whole, stimulating the learning environment while benefiting from the stimuli of a great research university.

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	Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, an award-winning independent filmmaker, pushes the art of filmmaking forward while portraying the struggles of women in diverse cultures. Vietnamese women recount their haunting memories; Chinese women converse about Mao and Confucius; Senegalese women work in the shadows of their villages -- these are some of the scenes that Trinh records and interlaces with poetry, popular songs, and archival images to produce memorable films that cannot be classified as experimental, documentary, or narrative, but constitute a new genre of their own. She says her films can be viewed, in general, as "different attempts to deal creatively with cultural difference, to enhance our understanding of the heterogeneous societies in which we live, and to invite viewers to engage with films and the arts in diverging and enriching ways."

	Trinh is a professor of film, women's studies, and rhetoric who joined the Berkeley faculty in 1992. Her five films have been shown internationally and have received many honors, including the jury's Best Cinematography Award at the 1992 Sundance Festival for Shoot for the Contents and the Best Film-As-Art Feature from the 1990 American International Film Festival for Surname Viet Given Name Nam. She also is the author of eight books that range from a collection of poetry to essays on feminism, architecture, and cultural politics. She is writing a script for a forthcoming fiction film that tells the story of a young woman's spiritual quest and touches on issues of friendship and death; and she observed Japanese art and daily rituals as part of a soon-to-be-released video project that considers how technology is affecting our reality and knowledge. Trinh's filmmaking and writing are by design difficult to categorize, because "the work I like most is not clearly recognizable as theory, fiction, or poetry, but rather, work that once you enter you don't know what territory you're in." This blend of art and theory aims to translate the cultural dynamics and power relations in societies that have been dominated by European powers, an area of scholarly interest generally referred to as postcolonial studies.
By creatively working in the intervals between politics and poetry, theory and art, Trinh deftly links the arts with other studies in the humanities and social sciences.	Trinh has a uniquely personal connection to her studies because of her years spent living and working in Vietnam and Africa. Born in Hanoi and raised in South Vietnam, she managed in spite of the ongoing war to distinguish herself as a young musician while studying piano and composition at the National Conservatory of Music and Theater in Saigon. Her French style of education gave her a lasting interest in French theory, and she studied literature and music in France before moving to the United States in the early 1970s. She earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. in French literature and a master of music in composition from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She then taught for three years at the National Conservatory of Music and Drama in Dakar, Senegal -- a pivotal period that spurred her filmmaking and writing. Her first two films, Reassemblage and the lengthier Naked Spaces -- Living Is Round, were inspired by that experience. Both films explore the rhythms, rituals, and physical space that define women's lives in West Africa, and they do so in a poetic style that explicitly questions the way ethnographic documentaries typically are produced. Naked Spaces won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Experimental Feature at the 1987 American Film Festival. While the subject matter of Trinh's films enhances the viewer's awareness of other cultures and marginalized people, her filmmaking techniques are as significant as the subjects themselves. She structures her scripts and frames her shots in ways that prompt the viewers to question their own role -- and the behind-the-scenes roles of the director and interviewer -- in shaping the response to a film.
Image from Trinh's Surname Viet Given Name Nam. See reference page	In Surname Viet Given Name Nam, for example, she intentionally leads the viewer to think that the Vietnamese women being interviewed are really the people they portray; then, when it becomes clear that the interviews are re-enactments by immigrant-actors who live in the United States, the viewer is led to consider issues such as plural identity and the fictions inherent in documentary techniques. And in A Tale of Love, her 1995 narrative film about a Vietnamese immigrant in San Francisco, she deliberately makes viewers feel a bit uncomfortable during some intimate scenes, as though they are spying on the characters. As Trinh explained in an interview for a film-theory magazine, "Unlike in other films where you can safely indulge in voyeurism, being a voyeur here is acknowledged and even given a prominent part in the film. . . . By making you aware of your being a voyeur, the film induces reflections on the makers' and viewers' consumption of love stories." By creatively working in the intervals between politics and poetry, theory and art, Trinh deftly links the arts with other studies in the humanities and social sciences. She shares her methods in the classroom and says she tries to inspire students to explore new avenues by combining their specialized academic studies with their creative impulses. This practice of the arts produces knowledge, as Professor Trinh and the other faculty featured here so clearly demonstrate. While language and text, the vehicles of the humanities, carry scholarship forward, the instruments and media of the arts provide scholars with infinite opportunities for expression and exploration. Not confined to galleries or performance halls, the arts at UC Berkeley are thriving through a symbiotic relationship with the campus as a whole, stimulating the learning environment while benefiting from the stimuli of a great research university.